The Khronos Group is working with Au-Zone Technologies to enable NNEF (Neural Network Exchange Format) files to be easily used with leading machine learning training frameworks. NNEF enables the optimized ingestion of trained neural networks into hardware inference engines on a diverse range of devices and platforms. Au-Zone is working with the Khronos NNEF Working Group to implement two purpose-built bidirectional converters, between TensorFlow and NNEF and also Caffe2 and NNEF. Both converters are expected to be released as open source projects to the development community in Q3 2018 under the Apache 2.0 license. Additionally, the NNEF and OpenVX Working Groups are working closely within Khronos to develop open-source importers, using the OpenVX Kernel Import extension, to enable the ingestion and execution of NNEF files.

If you were unable to attend IWOC 2018, you may be interest to hear that some of the videos are starting to appear online. First up is the "State of the OpenCL Nation" by Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and VP at NVIDIA.

Compressonator is a set of tools that allows artists and developers to work easily with compressed assets and easily visualize the quality impact of various compression technologies. Compressonator allows users to choose from all major compression formats for their texture files and supports DirectX® 12, Vulkan® and OpenGL®. Users can view OBJ files in OpenGL and GLTF with DirectX 12. Version 3.1 will support viewing GLTF 2.0 files using a choice of OpenGL, Vulkan or DirectX 12.

What Game Developers need to know about The Khronos Group and the latest in GPU and 3D rendering for games from Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group. More presentations, video and photos from GDC 2018 can be viewed in the Khronos' Developer library.

The 2018.04 release of the Magnum C++11/C++14 graphics engine has its OpenGL wrapping layer optional, making it possible to use Vulkan or other custom renderers. There's now a first-class glTF format import together with general asset management improvements. A new example shows how to integrate Leap Motion hand tracking with Magnum.

FlextGL is a function loader generator with support for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and now also Vulkan. By selecting only a subset of features, extensions and functions that's actually needed it can significantly shrink down size of API headers for faster compilation times and smaller executable size.

The Khronos™ OpenCL™ working group has today released a maintenance update to OpenCL 2.2 to consolidate numerous bug fixes and clarifications to make the specification more precisely defined and more easily understood. In this maintenance release, the OpenCL C specification has now also been put into open source.

Are you looking for a Khronos event in your area? Perhaps a relaxing and educational meetup is more your speed? The Khronos Group has you covered. Starting with full day events, registration is open for IWOCL in Oxford UK May 14, Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara on May 22 and Vulkanised! in Cambridge UK, also on May 22. If you are looking for meetups, there are plenty coming up covering OpenGL, OpenGL ES, AR, VR and OpenXR, WebVR, WebGL and glTF and in lots of great locations including Cambridge MA, Bishkek Kyrgyzstan, Sydney Australia, London UK, Somerville MA and Sunnyvale CA. Keep up-to-date with all the upcoming Khronos related events or subscribe with your calendar.

Qt 5.10 added support for ETC2 texture compression while for Qt 5.11 there is support for Khronos' KTX texture container format. The KTX file format for OpenGL and OpenGL ES allows for supporting a wider-range of compression algorithms to suit more hardware/driver options. [source: Phoronix]

The curriculum for the 2018 OpenVX Workshop at the Embedded Vision Summit in May has been finalized. The Khronos Group will be presenting a day-long hands-on workshop all about OpenVX cross-platform neural network acceleration API for embedded vision applications. Khronos has developed a new curriculum making this a do-not-miss tutorial with new information on computer vision algorithms for feature tracking and neural networks mapped to the graph API. The tutorials will be presented by speakers from Khronos member companies AMD, Axis Communications, Cadence and Codeplay. There will be hands-on practice sessions with the folks who created the OpenVX API to give participants a chance to solve real computer vision problems. Discussions will also include the OpenVX roadmap and what’s to come. Registration is now open but space is limited, so be sure not to wait too long.

AMD has released V-EZ v1.1.0 with a redesign of the API. The Vulkan API aliasing has been removed and replaced with "vez" prefixes, allowing for easier interop with native Vulkan. Support for Vulkan 1.1 SPIR-V features has been added, multiple swapchains is now supported, and applications now have finer grain control over memory allocations if needed. See the release page on github for more details.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Mercury Systems, Inc as its newest Contributor Member. Mercury Systems, Inc. is a leading commercial provider of secure sensor and safety-critical processing subsystems. Optimized for customer and mission success, Mercury's solutions power a wide variety of critical defense and intelligence programs. Headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, Mercury is pioneering a next-generation defense electronics business model specifically designed to meet the industry's current and emerging technology needs.

Qualcomm has released a new version of Snapdragon Profiler, the mobile performance profiling tool that runs on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. The release includes various bug fixes, a new Analysis mode, new Trace metrics across various SoC subsystems, and an experimental feature allowing developers to use the latest profiler updates for graphics profiling without having to update mobile drivers. Also included are fixes for various issues in Snapshot affecting EGL images and improved metric calculations for OpenCL applications.